Thursday, January 25, 1990
Section: Living
Page: 1D
Dateline: Los Angeles

By: ROBERT REINHOLD, New York Times

THE case of the Virginia McMartin Pre-School began six years ago with lurid news reports of children being raped and sodomized, of dead rabbits, mutilated corpses and a horse killing, and of blood drinking, satanic rituals and the sacrifice of a live baby in a church.

In the end, it was all swept away by a Los Angeles County jury that, with the patience of Job and an almost majestic disregard for the controversy swirling around them, rejected nearly all the child-molesting counts against the two defendants, Raymond Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, after a 30-month trial.

Correct or not, the verdict left open the question of how such a case could have gone so far, costing the taxpayers an estimated $15 million, and produced so little.

Lael Rubin, the co-prosecutor, said after the verdict for the defendants on Thursday: "The system worked well for them. They were lucky." But an examination of the tortuous history of the McMartin case, which produced the longest trial in American criminal history, suggests it was more than just bad luck that doomed the prosecution's case.

Those involved say much of the evidence was unconvincing from the outset; that there also were mistakes by the prosecution, questionable techniques to elicit accusations from the children, inordinate delays by Buckey's lawyer, Danny Davis, and public hysteria fanned by gullible initial news reports.

The verdict -- not guilty on 52 counts, deadlocks on 13 others -- enraged many, particularly the children's parents. Even some jurors said they were not fully convinced of Buckey's innocence, but that the prosecution had failed to mount sufficient evidence.

Others saw a grave miscarriage of justice for Buckey, who spent five years in jail before raising bail, and his mother, who spent nearly two years in jail and lost the family-owned school in Manhattan Beach.

The verdict represented something of an embarrassment not only for the prosecution but also for some in the news media, particularly KABC-TV, which first reported the accusations, "20 / 20," the ABC News program, as well as the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers that gave full credibility to the police in trumpeting the charges in 1984.

The verdict has produced a self-examination by the media, most notably a four-part series in the Los Angeles Times in which David Shaw, who covers the news media for the newspaper, asserted that his own newspaper consistently favored the prosecution and failed to scrutinize its charges.

Moreover, liaisons developed between the accusers and the news media that may or may not have influenced the coverage.

The KABC reporter who first disclosed the McMartin accusations, Wayne Satz, later entered into a romantic relationship with Kee MacFarlane, the social worker at the Children's Institute International. MacFarlane interviewed scores of the children and elicited the charges of child molesting from them

Satz said management and ABC counsel were aware of his relationship with MacFarlane and 'saw no impropriety.'

More recently, David Rosenzweig, the former metropolitan editor of the Los Angeles Times who supervised the coverage of the case for some time, has become engaged to Rubin, the prosecutor.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Rosenzweig did not meet Rubin until July 1988, more than four years after the case began, and removed himself from any role in the coverage soon afterward.

All involved deny any conflict of interest.

The McMartin case was one of the earliest and perhaps most sensational of the child- molesting cases that have arisen in recent years.

The case began in August 1983 with a call to the Manhattan Beach police from Judy Johnson, asserting that her son had been molested by Raymond Buckey at the school. Buckey was arrested but quickly released for lack of evidence.

In an effort to gain evidence, the police department sent a letter to 200 parents of current and former children at the school. The letter said investigators suspected "possible criminal acts" at the school, including oral sex, handling of genitals and sodomy.

The letter set off a panic and, some lawyers have said, tainted the case from the outset. (The Manhattan Beach Police Department currently faces a civil suit from Peggy Buckey.

Soon hundreds of parents got in touch with the police, but became distraught over harsh police questioning of their children. The prosecutor's officer referred them to MacFarlane at the Children's Institute, an 86-year-old private therapy center.

Controversial interview

At first most of the children denied being molested.

But in extensive taped interviews in which anatomically correct dolls were used, the children were told other children had divulged "yucky secrets" about the school and were urged to do likewise. Ultimately, about 360 of the 400 children interviewed described abuse.

On the basis of testimony from 18 children and doctors' testimony of physical results of abuse, but little other corroborating evidence, a grand jury on March 22, 1984, indicted Raymond Buckey; his mother; his elderly grandmother who founded the school, Virginia McMartin; his sister, Peggy Ann Buckey, and three other teachers, Betty Raidor, Babette Spitler and Mary Ann Jackson, on 115 counts (later expanded to 321 counts involving 48 children).

Doctors said all of the children showed medical evidence of abuse, though that was challenged in some cases by the defense.

A few days after the indictment, the prosecution asserted that child pornography was the motive of the alleged molesting.

But a worldwide search by the FBI and Interpol found no photographs or films, nor did extensive excavations on the school grounds turn up animal bones, hidden passageways or other evidence.

The defense team has contended that the entire case was concocted and that there was simply no evidence any child had been abused at the school.

The defense lawyers' view was presented last October in an article in Los Angeles magazine by Mary A. Fischer, a free- lance writer who worked closely with the defense.

In the article, Fischer said the case was turned into a national cause celebre by the intersecting ambitions and misplaced zeal of six people.

The six were Judy Johnson, the mother, who suffered from mental illness and later died of the effects of alcoholism; Jane Hoag, the detective who originally investigated the complaints; MacFarlane, the social worker; Robert Philibosian, the district attorney at the time, who was engaged in a battle for re-election; Satz, the television reporter who first reported the case; and Rubin, the prosecutor.

Philibosian, now in private law practice here, in Los Angeles, disputed suggestions that he pushed the case to bolster his campaign against Ira Reiner, who won the election in 1984.

The real culprit, he said, was time -- delays by the defense.

After Philibosian's departure the case lumbered on, and it began to sag of its own weight. A preliminary hearing to determine whether there was enough evidence to justify a trial began in June 1984.

It lasted 18 months and proved numbingly difficult, with seven different sets of lawyers for the seven defendants each cross-examining 13 child witnesses. The judge ordered all seven to trial on a total of 135 counts on Jan. 9, 1986.

Seven days later, Reiner dropped charges against all but Raymond and Peggy Buckey, saying the evidence against the five other defendants was "incredibly weak."

Disputed testimony

Comments by jurors indicated the children's testimony did nothing to strengthen the case against the Buckeys. The case fell, jurors said, mainly because they thought the children were led into making incriminating statements by MacFarlane and other interviewers at the center.

Psychologists say molested children are often fearful of talking about their experiences and try to draw them out by suggestion. But this backfired in court.

"The children were scared," MacFarlane said. "They thought they might die or their parents might die. When we realized that's what kept them silent, we began to feel we were not going to get to any of that information until they got over that fear.

"One way is to say we talked to a lot of their friends and they told of yucky secrets. I felt that it gave a message there may be something yucky they could tell. We found it relieved them. It took the onus off being the first one.

"Unfortunately there were no adult witnesses or videotapes of the crime. I was naive in never having been part of a case like this."

A number of critics have pointed to mistakes by Rubin, who has a reputation as a tough, aggressive prosecutor determined to get convictions.

One of her witnesses against Buckey was George Freeman, a notorious jailhouse informer and perjurer who asserted that when they shared a cell, Buckey confessed that he molested children.

After the verdict, Rubin asserted that the defendants were guilty but had gotten the best of a ponderous legal system.

Asked why she pressed on even though no pornography or other physical evidence was found, she said, "Because the Buckeys had learned of the investigation before the police had served the warrant, there was ample time to get rid of (evidence)."

Finally, there was the role of the news media, which may have pressured the authorities to push the case. The leader was Satz of KABC-TV.

His first report, on Feb. 2, 1984, said more than 60 children "have now each told authorities that he or she had been keeping a grotesque secret of being sexually abused and made to appear in pornographic films while in the preschool's care -- and of having been forced to witness the mutilation and killing of animals to scare the kids into staying silent."

Satz's reports were accompanied by full-page newspaper advertisements placed by his station showing a battered teddy bear, and the news anchors virtually pronounced the teachers guilty in introducing Satz's reports.

Satz, a lawyer by training, said he had always made it clear that these were "merely allegations" and had consistently given or tried to get the Buckeys' responses. He said he regretted the "gratuitous" remarks of the anchors and the newspaper ads.

In the Los Angeles Times, Shaw wrote in his recent series that the news media had played a "pivotal and sometimes distorting role" in the case and had abandoned their usual skepticism in the early stages

In the end, though, the ultimate skeptics were the twelve jurors who finally left Judge William R. Pounders' court in downtown Los Angeles last Thursday afternoon having disposed of the longest criminal case in American history.

Many in the public were outraged, but as one juror, Brenda Williams, a telephone company service representative, put it: "They did not listen to 2 1/2 years of testimony. I am sorry i the world is not happy. But it was me there, and I can live with it."

The San Jose Mercury News archives are stored on a SAVE (tm) newspaper library system from Vu / Text Library Services, a Knight-Ridder Inc. company.

Last Updated: 26 Nov 95 -- Mark Pritchard

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